There isn’t really a suitable place to begin, because the world falls apart and back together at all hours of every day forever, and sometimes this is a bearable fact but mainly it is not.
I’m preparing to move country again, for what feels like the thousandth time in three years but which will hopefully be one of the last. I think there is surely something additionally unsettling about uprooting the interior self during an intensely unsettled exterior time, but there really isn’t much of a way around it, and every day I’m trying to practice and adhere to a consciousness of the absurd degree of comfort and opportunity—and basic safety—so many of us have.
It is a painful and important and requiring time to be a person with any degree of reasonable feeling.
OF WORK AND WORK-RELATED THINGS:
A few tiny-final adjustments were made to my upcoming book, the process of which was (my editor found the right word), bittersweet. It felt as though I might wish to never stop making tiny adjustments, to make minute changes forever, in part because I have so enjoyed working with her on the book, and in part because I did not want to leave the painted, beautiful containment this time has provided—it has become the book it is because of how much creative allowance and generosity I was given, and that is not something that feels so easy to leave behind.
I have also, ahead of my main new-book-announcement in May, updated and moved around my website, which now reflects to a far better degree me, myself, and I, and my four current book children:
More generally: Thoughts were thought, worries were worried, administrative tasks were begrudgingly completed, important or relevant-seeming things were written down, emails were responded to. Other things may have happened though if they did? I have forgotten them.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
With thanks to a daily art app, the work of Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944), a Dutch graphic artist active in the years preceding the Second World War. Having been removed from his home along with his wife and only child in Watergraafsmeer, which is now part of Amsterdam, he was gassed with his wife at Auschwitz on February 11th 1944.
“If one is reading a book, a thumb in the book signals an allegiance to the book, and the interrupter should expect only the most cursory reply. But if the book gets shut with a bookmark, or placed down open-faced, and full conversation will most likely follow.”
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
“We watch the ebbing of light from the world on a stormy evening. Another dawn will come, another spring, but who will see it?”
Margaret Leigh, Spade Among the Rushes
"I think there is surely something additionally unsettling about uprooting the interior self during an intensely unsettled exterior time" - THIS. I felt this in my bones! We are just starting to settle in our new home but we might have to move again soon-ish and I just... don't have it in me anymore. But I keep telling myself that movement is part of life, and that whatever happens, it will be okay. <3 Thank you for your words, as always.
Your words always hit right to the core of how I’m feeling. Thank you for including the hard stuff of life along with the beautiful. Your words are comforting and inspiring…they help me be with what is, and also help me move forward. With much gratitude 💜